Meet the expert of eBRAIN-Health

Within eBRAIN-Health, Dr. Pollentier’s team leads the technical development of the project’s central platform node. This work builds on systems previously developed in large-scale research initiatives, including the Virtual Research Environment (VRE) at Charité and the HealthDataCloud (HDC) created within the Human Brain Project.

In the context of eBRAIN-Health, the team continues to evolve the “Pilot-HDC” into a core, secure research data management service that is integrated with the EBRAINS ecosystem. This role is closely connected with partners working on the Knowledge Graph, openMINDS metadata standards, and other key services and features within EBRAINS.

A major milestone has been the establishment of seamless software-level integration between the central node platform Pilot-HDC and the EBRAINS Knowledge Graph. This integration allows researchers to describe sensitive datasets using rich metadata formatted according to the openMINDS standard and to make these metadata discoverable via the public Knowledge Graph, while the underlying sensitive data remain securely stored on the central node.

In addition, the INDOC team introduced a user-friendly onboarding feature that enables any EBRAINS-registered researcher to self-enroll in a general-purpose test project on the platform. This functionality has already been used by researchers from several other consortia, who have expressed strong interest in adopting the platform for their own work.

Finally, Pilot-HDC is maintained as open-source software under the AGPL-3.0 license, ensuring long-term transparency, reusability, and support for community-driven development.

Working in academic research environments comes with inherent challenges, particularly when navigating evolving requirements and ensuring long-term sustainability for complex software systems. One of the main hurdles encountered was the unexpected need to migrate the platform from the initial host to another service provider, which required additional time and efforts.

Dr. Pollentier’s team has extensive experience in both academic and industrial development environments, allowing them to translate scientific needs into robust engineering practices and adapt to constantly evolving requirements and conditions.

Throughout this particular project, the close collaboration with partner development teams at EBRAINS has helped the team navigate many hurdles, align technical components smoothly, and deliver a stable and scalable solution. Experiences like these underline the importance of Research Software Engineering (RSE) initiatives, which advocate for sustainable, high-quality research software as a core component of scientific progress and which the team actively supports.

INDOC’s contribution provides the technical backbone for secure and privacy-preserving data management within the eBRAIN-Health infrastructure. By integrating closely with key EBRAINS services and offering a user-friendly and scalable solution for handling sensitive health datasets, the team helps ensure that researchers across Europe can collaborate effectively, share data and insights responsibly, and access advanced tools for neuroscience and clinical research.

The platform’s open-source foundation and its interoperability with the broader EBRAINS ecosystem position it as a long-term, sustainable service that will continue to evolve in line with the needs of the scientific community.